Abstract
Over the last few years, the term ‘smart cities’ has gained traction in academic, industry, and policy debates about the deployment of new media technologies in urban settings. It is mostly used to describe and market technologies that make city infrastructures more efficient, and personalize the experience of the city. Here, we want to propose the notion of ‘ownership’ as a lens to take an alternative look at the role of urban new media in the city. With the notion of ownership we seek to investigate how digital media and culture allow citizens to engage with, organize around and act upon collective issues and engage in co–creating the social fabric and built form of the city. Taking ownership as the point of departure, we wish to broaden the debate about the role of new media technologies in urban design from an infrastructural to a social point of view, or from ‘city management’ to ‘city making.’
Highlights
Urban media technologies stimulate a profound personalization of city life on spatial, social, and mental levels [1]
We want to contribute to the social city discourse by advancing the notion of ‘ownership’ as a lens to look at how cities are made and remade with the help of digital media
‘Networked publics’ are groups of people that use social media and other digital technologies to organize themselves around collective goals or issues (Varnelis, 2008)
Summary
Urban media technologies stimulate a profound personalization of city life on spatial, social, and mental levels [1]. Mobile devices with their multimedia capabilities allow people to create highly idiosyncratic images of the city [5]. Listening to music on one’s mobile device for example generates — in the words of one of Michael Bull’s respondents — the “illusion of omnipotence” [6]. These media foster an individualized ‘sense of place’, a feeling of being part and in control of a situation (Meyrowitz, 1985). Examples of actual ‘smart cities’ include towns built from scratch like New Songdo in South Korea (http://www.songdo.com) and Masdar in the United Arab Emirates (http://masdarcity.ae), but more often existing cities that are made ‘smarter’, like the Amsterdam Smart City project in the Netherlands (http://amsterdamsmartcity.com)
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